In recent days, the spread of various unfounded claims has been fueled by influential personalities, including ex-president Donald Trump or billionaire Elon Musk, who often shares false or misleading claims on his social network X. The flood of misinformation was so strong that the federal agency for emergency situations FEMA launched a page where it tries to put the rumors in perspective.
“I’ve never seen anything like this,” the sheriff in one of the counties in western North Carolina told The New York Times (NYT). Aaron Ellenburg said he has been refuting unsubstantiated claims for several days that people’s land will be confiscated for lithium mining or that bulldozers are burying corpses in the area. “I’m fed up with this bullshit,” he added.
The disinformation wave came soon after the storm hit, which killed at least 230 people across several states. A day after torrential rains in North Carolina, local resident Nicole McNeil came across the news that a second storm was rolling into the area, The Washington Post (WP) reports. It caused the woman to have a panic attack because she knew she didn’t have enough gas in the tank to evacuate. “The second storm turned out to be a nonsense rumor,” McNeil said.
In the following days, many more appeared. The local website The News & Observer also mentions the claim that Hurricane Helene was created by the government in its overview of disinformation. Republican congresswoman and conspiracy theorist Marjorie Taylor Greene fueled this fiction when she wrote on X last week: “Yes, they can control the weather.”
Much of the misinformation targets FEMA’s work supporting operations across the affected area. In recent days, ex-president and Republican candidate for the White House, Trump has helped spread accusations that the agency does not have enough money to support hurricane victims because it spent “billions of dollars” on housing for immigrants.
The fact is that FEMA recently received $650 million for the immigrant assistance program, which is completely separate from the disaster management budget. At the same time, a number of media pointed out that the Trump administration in 2019 transferred part of the funds intended for operations after natural disasters to cover the costs associated with migration.
In the south-east of the USA, even after more than a week, work continues to restore electricity supplies or repair roads damaged by storm Helena. It is not entirely clear how significantly these operations are complicated by the spread of unsubstantiated claims, however, a number of officials have in recent days called on residents to better verify information.
Sheriff Kerry Giles, who works in the same county as Sheriff Ellenburg, told CNN that disproving the misinformation “required resources that could have been more effectively spent on recovery work.” The WP newspaper, in turn, described an incident where hundreds of people unnecessarily evacuated due to false information about the imminent breach of the dam.
The NYT noted that misinformation about climate change usually increases after natural disasters, which the US has recently experienced after floods, heatwaves and fires. “False claims attribute these events to globalist conspiracies, arson or the so-called energy weapons. They often rely on old footage or images created by artificial intelligence, as well as misleading arguments from the oil and gas industry, politicians and foreign actors,” the newspaper said.
According to CNN, developments around Helena do not bode well for the upcoming US presidential elections. “If you think the lies, distortions and completely uninformed comments about FEMA are bad, just wait until next month,” The Atlantic reporter Tim Alberta commented on the situation.